If you can persuade forum member ttuuxxx to compile and pre-configure the app VLC, you will not need another media player. When ttuuxxx pre-configures VLC, there are Multimedia menu entries for each function of VLC, namely, Play DVD movie, Play music CD, Play VCD, and VLC media player. VLC requires the qt4 library.

I don't know why the Puppy project cannot give VLC the respect it deserves by making it the default media player. Generally, if a version of Puppy cannot install VLC, I lose interest quickly.

I'm just wondering if anyone can suggest something a little better than Deadbeef without being huge.

Deadbeef seems to be the current flavour-of-the-month for the type of audio player you're after, so your choice is probably fine.
I personally prefer the look and feel of BMP, and if you do some Googling you will find quite a number of people who go to a lot of trouble getting the classic XMMS running on modern Linux distros. XMMS seems to have a cult following.

I suggest you take a look at Goggles. I haven't tried it myself, but it seems to have earned itself a dedicated following.

xan wrote:

Some sort of auto-level control would be good.

This requires either -
i) ReplayGain support
or
ii) some form of normalizer plugin
You just need to check what's available for the player application you choose.

xan wrote:

Are any better sound quality than others?

Ah, that's a BIG question. And it depends on how good your hifi system is, too.
Generally, audio player applications are supposed to read digital audio files, decompress them if necessary, and create a digital audio stream to feed to a sound card. If they all do this job properly, there should be minimal difference in sound quality between them.
In practice, however, they may use different codec libraries which can result in differences in sound quality - if your music library is MP3, you should aim to use a player which utilises the libMAD library - this is generally agreed to be the best MP3 decoder.
Worse, though, some audio player applications apply filtering and EQ, because they assume this will improve "sound quality" on the "average" user's junk computer speakers. I think Winamp was guilty of this at one stage.

The best contributor of computer sound quality is the operating system itself. In this regard, you're lucky to be using Linux, because the underlying ALSA sound system handles audio very well - much better than Windows XP - and this difference is audible (with a decent sound card).
For the ultimate in sound quality, you can (and should) configure ALSA to bypass its internal volume control (dmix).
More of this information can be found in the MPD thread -
http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?t=70052
You will see that there are also potential tweaks to the Linux kernel, itself.

From there, you're in audiophile territory. Have a browse through the postings at
www.computeraudiophile.com/forum/
This level of sound quality assumes a high-end computer sound card - something like the Ayre Acoustics QB-9 USB DAC ($2500) or Wavelength Audio Crimson USB DAC ($7500).

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